CT Scanning and 3D Printing Package Quickly and Accurately Produce Parts Without Original CAD

Desktop Metal, a leader in additive manufacturing technologies for mass production, and Lumafield, a startup offering the world’s first accessible industrial X-ray CT platform, have announced a complete solution to help manufacturers quickly and accurately produce high-demand parts with an easy system to scan and 3D print.

As a result of the COVID pandemic, manufacturers have been faced with historic supply chain disruptions, along with wide swings in pricing and inventory. Additive manufacturing offers the ability to cost-effectively in-source production and reduce supply chain risk, but often requires manufacturers to have CAD models of their parts. That has been a significant barrier; manufacturers often rely on thousands or millions of parts, many of which were designed years ago and don’t have associated CAD files. 3D scanning has been proposed as a solution, but it’s limited to capturing exterior part features.

The Supply Chain Resilience package from Desktop Metal and Lumafield closes that gap by joining 3D printing with X-ray computed tomography, also known as CT scanning. The combination of these technologies allows manufacturers to scan old parts and reproduce them quickly in a variety of materials using 3D printing.

Lumafield’s CT platform digitizes parts with a series of X-ray images that capture both external and internal features in detail, using powerful cloud-based software to create a 3D model that can be exported as a mesh representation for 3D printing.

Desktop Metal’s software and 3D printers can then turn those mesh models back into high-quality metal or polymer parts, making it possible to seamlessly replace legacy manufacturing processes with in-house 3D printing.

“Manufacturers have wanted to replace legacy fabrication processes with 3D printing for a long time, but digitalization of parts has been a barrier,” said Ric Fulop, Founder and CEO of Desktop Metal. “With accessible CT scanning, we finally have the digitization solution we need to quickly convert old designs into complete CAD files for 3D printing.”

“The last two years have been profoundly disruptive, and we cannot expect our supply chains to return to normal,” said Eduardo Torrealba, Co-Founder and CEO of Lumafield. “Fortunately, we now have the technology to seamlessly bring production in-house, taking control of our supply chains and reducing risk.”

Lumafield’s Neptune scanner is a revolutionary advance over legacy CT systems. It’s at home in any office or workshop environment, ready to become an everyday tool for entire engineering teams. With a user-friendly touchscreen and AI-powered configuration, anyone can use it with minimal training—no dedicated operator required.

Lumafield’s cloud-based Voyager software turns scans into actionable insights and is included with every Neptune scanner. In addition to producing mesh exports for 3D printing, it offers intuitive visualizations that reveal invisible features, measurement tools that take guesswork out of inspection, and a powerful automated analysis engine that pinpoints voids, pores, and cracks before they turn into critical problems. Voyager runs in the cloud, accessible through any desktop web browser, so teams can collaborate and share data in real time.